Windows Mail contacts disappeared

Windows Mail was working fine on my Vista machine, but recently when I tried to forward some mails to my friends then I found out that all of the contacts that were stored in my the mail vanished. I tried opening the contacts folder but i was totally empty. Although I had made a backup of the contacts but that wasnt having everything but something is better than nothing and so I imported it successfully. I was wondering what could have caused this issue so that in future I will be ready, does anyone have any idea?

Could you let use know what antivirus program have you installed in your machine? I ask you this because there are some antivirus software that mess up the registry entry for the message rules in Windows Mail and therefore I think that it would be best to uninstall such antivirus like Norton or Mcafee. This antivirus have some problem and conflict with Windows Mail. So, the best solution that I could offer you is to remove all those applications and then install the free version of AVG antivirus.

I am using a third party application called Zappit which can be used to store contacs on the hard drive. It usually stores all the contacts under C/Users/My Name/Contacts and can be used as an alternative for Windows Mail contact. Another thing to save the contacts would be to install the Upgraded version of Windows Live Mail which will solve the contacts disappearing issue forever.